Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.”
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)
“Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once.”
Wheeler quoted this saying in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information (1990), p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=mdjsOeTgatsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false, with a footnote attributing it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Later publications, such as Paul Davies' 1995 book About Time (p. 236), credited Wheeler with variations of this saying, but the quip is actually much older. The earliest known source is Ray Cummings' 1922 science fiction novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21094 Ch. V: " 'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.' " It also appears in his 1929 novel The Man Who Mastered Time. http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor The earliest known occurrence other than Cummings is from 1962 in Film Facts: Volume 5, p. 48 http://books.google.com/books?id=sr0vAQAAIAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22.
Misattributed
Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 20 (p. 332).
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 184; this also has been quoted as "What happens once will never happen again. But what happens twice will surely happen a third time."
“But just because you bury something, that doesn’t mean it stops existing.”
Source: We'll Always Have Summer
Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 6 (p. 59)
